Sat, Dec 27, 2003 page9

• In the fight over a settlement, it's Israelis vs Israelis

  A group of rabbis says that no prime minister has the right to hand over a piece of Israel, believing biblical law is a higher authority

  • By Richard Bernstein / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The Hebrew signs posted along the road to this hilltop settlement on the West Bank say, "The Battle Begins in Migron," and on Tuesday, as a thousand or more people arrived here in a caravan of cars and vans and buses, ostensibly to put a Torah scroll into the synagogue, it was clear that the battle had begun.

  There were bearded men holding the scrolls aloft and chanting lines from the prophet Isaiah ("It shall not stand; neither shall it come to pass") while young men danced around them in a circle. Women pushed strollers; men held small children on their shoulders while machine guns were slung over their backs. Everybody had a good time.

  But what shall not stand, in the crowd's view, is the announced policy of the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Migron and other illegal outposts like it are going to be dismantled. Sharon, under pressure from the US to implement the terms of the peace plan known as the road map, pledged in a speech last week that he would soon evacuate the illegal settlements, and Migron is the largest and best-known of them all.

  Hence the very widespread feeling in Israel that Migron is indeed going to be a battleground, not between Israelis and Palestinians but between Israelis and Israelis, or, more specifically, between the government and a settler movement that is powerful, well-organized and determined not to give an inch.

  "To bring a Torah here is the opposite of evacuating a community," Pinchas Wallerstein, an official of the local Israeli administration who is regarded as a sort of father of the settlement movement in this region, said, shouting over the clamor of the Torah installation ceremony. He was asked what will happen if the government, as many people expect, sends the army to take Migron down.

  "First we are acting through the courts and we believe we will have the support of the courts," Wallerstein replied. "If not, we'll ask thousands of people to be here, and if we have 10,000 people, they will need 40,000 police and soldiers, and there's no such force in Israel."

  Migron is, when not being visited by one or two thousand supporters, a pretty unprepossessing place, a cluster of 40 or so trailers, installed on a rocky, treeless promontory. On Tuesday, the Arab town of Deir Dibwan could be seen glistening in the hazy sun across the valley to the north, a reminder of how close things are on the West Bank.

  Migron started a year or so ago, with a couple of trailers, water and electricity connection, then a few more trailers, a total of 42 now, along with a permanent-looking stone building that serves as the synagogue. Many of the young couples who have set up households here grew up in places that were once similar to what Migron is today, a kind of encampment among Arab villages, encircled by a fence. They are in this sense the second settler generation, continuing what is to them a tradition.

  "I love this place," Moriya Harell, a 25-year-old graduate of film school said in a conversation last Friday. She was preparing a Sabbath meal while carrying her 7-week-old son, Yaacov, in a sling. "This is my place. I come from a religious home and for me it's a natural thing to live here and to raise my child here."

  Harell represents the major trend in the settler movement, namely that it has become essentially a religious movement carried on by people who believe that they are carrying out God's wish by settling on the ancient hills known in the Bible as Judea and Samaria. As Harell's husband, Itay, 29, put it, the classical, most secular Zionism that spurred Israel's creation has become "tired" and the energy now comes from religious conviction.

  But in a democracy like Israel, Itay Harell was asked, what gives him and the other settlers the authority to stay if the government and the law determine that they must go? He claimed a higher authority than the government.

  "There's no comparison between the state law and biblical law," he replied. "There was a meeting of rabbis in Migron the other day, and they affirmed that no prime minister has the right to hand over a piece of the land of Israel."

  It would be easy, especially in the festive spirit that prevailed in Migron on Tuesday, to become swept up in the enthusiasm of this place -- the new homes, the bracing desert air, the attractive young people who are starting families here, all of them connected spiritually with ancient times.

  Many Israelis, probably even some non-settlers, have sympathy for the young people on a hilltop like Migron, seeing it in the tradition of early Zionism, which was, after all, a movement to build new communities on patches of what was largely barren land.

  "People say, `that's us 30 years ago,'" Shlomo Kaniel, a settler since 1977 and professor of educational psychology at Bar Ilan University, said in an interview. "They say, `It's exactly the way we did it and the way we have done it over the years.'"

  But Migron also represents the chief divide in Israel, between those who feel that the settlements extend the Zionist enterprise and those who feel that it has hijacked that enterprise, and endangered the long-term survival of Israel in the process.

  "Zionism was a secular messianism," Yarom Ezrahi, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said. "All the Zionist leaders were both utopian and pragmatic, but what you have with the settlers is the utopian part frighteningly unaccompanied by the pragmatic part."

  "There is a distinction between creating the Jewish national home, which was done in the context of a war of survival for the Jewish people, and a colonial movement that cannot be justified as a necessity for Israeli security," Ezrahi said.

  The Sharon government, confronting the problem of Migron, seems to fall between these two views -- Migron as a God-given right and Migron as an unjustified and unnecessary obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. For that reason, perhaps, there is no agreement at all among Israelis over how Sharon will carry out his pledge to dismantle the illegal settlements -- something he is required to do by the US-supported peace plan known as the road map.

  Perhaps he will find a way to give a sort of retroactive approval status to Migron and thereby avoid confrontation. He might then evacuate a few of the smaller outposts, those consisting merely of a trailer or two, visible on many West Bank hills.

  However, if he does only that, he risks angering the US, which has been pressing him for a major gesture to get negotiations back on track. The newspaper Haaretz on Tuesday cited an unnamed US official saying explicitly that the US expects Israel to dismantle Migron.

  But the crowd of people dancing around the Torah here shows that evacuating that particular settlement is not going to be easy. And, if there is a violent clash and people are hurt, Israeli public opinion could easily turn against the government.

  "The confrontation will not be between the army and Migron," Kaniel said. "It will be between the army and the many, many settlers who will come and make Migron much stronger. That's where the potential for an explosion is."
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